HipHop for PHP in Production at Hyves

The tracker is opensource: https://github.com/hyves-org/p2ptracker

We're working on open sourcing more moving parts of our deploypipeline.

I'd be interested to compare notes on your system ?

Don't define constants where the name of the constant is a variable, as in "define($key, $value)"

Don't use "current($a)" to get the first element of an array $a, but use "reset($a)". current returns whatever element the internal array pointer points to, and PHP changes that pointer in crazy/undefined ways. Hiphop has a saner way to handle that pointer, but it's not the same as in PHP so your code might break if it's dependent on the specificities of PHP. In general use current only in case you are explicitly handling the internal pointer (that is, you are also calling reset/next).

Under the compiled version of hiphop, class_exists returns true for (almost) all the classes even if you haven't already included the file where they are defined, since they are all statically compiled.

Don't rely on destructors being called at the end of the requests: under hiphop they aren't. So either the object happens to be destructed during request execution (due to its reference count going to 0), in which case the destructor is called, or the object is garbage collected at the end of the request and its destructor is just ignored.

There are some differences in the handling of SOAP errors in Hiphop.

This will give a fatal error in Hiphop but not PHP: $z = null, $z[0] = "foo";

You can consult these Hiphop docs: https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/raw/master/doc/incons... and https://github.com/facebook/hiphop-php/raw/master/doc/incons... for a list of other inconsistencies between PHP and Hiphop.

The Hiphop project started of because one engineer thought it was "really cool" and when he was able to produce impressive benchmarks, we put some more company effort into it.

Stuff like closures, eval(), create_function(), constants with dynamic names (e.g. defining constants from an array) and class destructors were all not supported. Some more subtle stuff: you cannot use current() to get the first element of an array in Hiphop, class_exists() always returns true.

We also had to port our custom PHP extensions.

Finally, we spend a lot of time on related stuff such as precompiling all Smarty templates (so that the generated PHP gets translated to C++ too), using Hiphop's daemon system and setting up compile, build and deploy systems.

The referenced post states "It is so complete that it can run both MediaWiki and WordPress out of the box."